Closed-loop MIMO systems typically transmit channel state information from a receiver to a transmitter over a feedback path. The channel state information may be used to employ beamforming to compensate for the current channel conditions increasing signal-to-noise (SNR) levels at the receiver. In some of these conventional systems, a beamforming matrix may be generated at the receiver based on the channel conditions. The beamforming matrix may then be provided to the transmitter as feedback. This feedback consumes bandwidth that might otherwise be available for data traffic. To reduce the overhead associated with this feedback, codewords of a known codebook may be provided instead of an actual beamforming matrix. The codewords may indicate which beamforming matrix is to be used by the transmitter.
In these systems, a receiver feeds back, among other things, precoding information, to a transmitter that recommends a precoder for use in transmitting beamformed signals back to the receiver. Since the selection of precoders is limited to particular codebooks, the recommended precoder may not be ideal based on the current channel conditions. Multi-user (MU) MU-MIMO and coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmissions are particularly sensitive to this quantization error for a given codebook. Although this quantization error may be reduced through the use of a larger codebook, recommending a precoder associated with a larger codebook would require significant additional feedback as well as defining a larger codebook.
Thus, what are needed are user equipment (UE) and methods for precoding that reduce quantization error without the use of larger codebook. What are also needed are user equipment and methods for precoding that reduce quantization error suitable for MU-MIMO and CoMP in LTE networks.